The Race Card

30 May 2012, 15:22

The Race Card

In a battle between good and evil, the lesser prevails. We live in a world where conquering a land is man's greatest achievement, and total control is the ultimate prize, but corruption? Is this due to power? Or is power created through corruption?

South Africa is known for many things, some of these things include corruption, crime, racism, and as of 1994, democracy. South Africa is also considered the most resourceful country in the world, from gold mining, to farming, thus giving it the potential to become an economic giant. All potential and no success lead us to question why South Africa is still a third world country.

April 6 1652, once a holiday known as founders’ day, based on the landing of Jan van Riebeck in the cape; an explorer, commander of the cape, and father of the Boer nation. Founder’s day has been abolished by the ANC because it is not in their interest to remember the day that South Africa became South Africa.

The modern day South African is afraid of history, afraid of the evil that haunted the past, but was this evil, or perhaps a breakthrough in world history? If we embrace the past, we will move on to embrace the future. Instead of trying to pretend that nothing happened, we should examine what did happen.

The race card is being played too easily lately, and with the same excuse every time, “we were oppressed”. Don’t you think it is about time we put our foot down and removed these grey areas? We need to determine who was oppressed. So we start with the black people, or Africans so to speak. The Africans were forced to live in one particular area and required a pass book to enter a white or European area, they were beaten and arrested for disobeying the laws, and they were denied good jobs and good education. Now we take a look at the whites, every 18 year old boy was forced to join either the police or the army when leaving school, to fight a war on terrorism, that’s all they knew. If a man were to deny the army, he was arrested, if a white man questioned the government he was arrested, and if a white man was found in a township, he was also beaten and arrested. Already we have laws in place for both black and white, however the concept of forced separation encouraged racism, which started the border war and forced the ANC to perform terrorist acts.

To elaborate a little more, a black person was denied his freedom, forced to work a low paying job, and had a limited education. On the other hand, white people were forced to join the army for a small salary, kill people, put their life on the line, and abandon their family. The black man grows up seeing the white man as a murder, while the white man is told that the black man is a terrorist, they both struggle to survive after the incident and sink into poverty which causes them to fight each other for food. The only difference here is the colour of their skin; they were both oppressed by the government in different ways, if affirmative action kept its true meaning, the soldiers should then benefit from it too because they were also forced into poverty by the ruling party.

Nelson Mandela strongly believed in equity, and wanted all South Africans to live in peace, instead the ANC has rather turned the tables on the country and has chosen to empower the oppressed black people only, what about the soldiers? We are all South African, we were all oppressed, but the world sees it from a different view.

My father was forced to fight, for 10 years it was either jail or the army, when he came out of it there was nothing left for him, thus causing me to be impacted as there was never enough money for better education. A black friend of mine had a father too, who was denied education, thus resulting in a low paying job, and no money for better education. We are exactly alike, oppressed to the same degree, and here we are, being forced to hate each other by a second oppressing government, the ANC.

They know that they do not have a better hand than their opponent, but continue to call the bluff, in the end they are just good gamblers with a bad hand.

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